Seizing the Airwaves

Radio by and for the people

Community-driven radio has always played a significant role in winning the hearts and minds of people in movements for social change, economic justice and human rights. But the history of dramatic media consolidation in this country has made it extraordinarily difficult for all but an elite few to control their own media.

Today, after years of activism, a new law on low-power FM (LPFM) radio is paving the way for the greatest expansion of FM radio in decades. This is a huge victory for media justice: Communities across the U.S. now have the power to transform the media landscape and fight corporate media owned and controlled by the 1 Percent. It’s an unprecedented opportunity for historically marginalized communities of color, immigrant and low-income folks to own and operate their own means of media production and infrastructure—through their own LPFM radio station.

During the civil rights movement, radio provided a crucial platform for African-American leaders to disseminate information and to educate and organize others to join the struggle. During the 1950s, television overtook radio as the most lucrative entertainment medium, leading to the abandonment of radio stations. Local radio station owners found themselves with more autonomy to experiment with local programming. Suddenly, African-Americans with some financial means were able to own and operate their own mass media.

In Atlanta in 1949, African-American banker Jesse Blayton used his entire savings of $50,000 to buy a 1,000-watt station, WERD, from a white owner. His programming featured black voices and R&B, and addressed issues of the day like the racist Jim Crow laws and the civil rights fight. Blayton hired the head of the Georgia state NAACP chapter to produce a news series.

The WERD station was housed one floor above the main offices of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leader-ship Committee. Station DJ Jack Gibson described the close relationship between the station and SCLC (News for All the People, 2011):

If Dr. King wanted to make an announcement, he’d take a broomstick and hit on the ceiling…. If I was on the air, I’d say: “We interrupt this program for another message from the president of the SCLC, Martin Luther King Jr. And now here is Dr. King!”

A British parliamentary report has issued a scathing report that finds Rupert Murdoch is “not a fit person” to run a major international media company because of how News Corp. handled its phone-hacking scandal. The Parliamentary Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport said Murdoch and his son, James, showed “willful blindness” about the scale of phone hacking at the News of the World tabloid. The panel’s finding has prompted a U.S. watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, to call on the Federal Communications Commission to revoke News Corp.’s 27 Fox broadcast licenses in the United States. We speak with David Leigh, investigations editor at The Guardian, the news outlet that first exposed the phone-hacking practices taking place within the Murdoch media empire. Leigh says the British panel’s findings could threaten Murdoch’s media presence across the Atlantic: “People are now beginning to say, ’Doesn’t this bleed over into the man who runs Fox News and has all those TV outlets in the U.S.?’ If he’s not fit and proper person in Britain, he’s not a fit and proper person in the U.S., either.” Read the rest of the transcript here.